Boston police chief wants drones for next year’s marathon

United States Vice President Joe Biden says the 2014 Boston Marathon will be "bigger, more spectacular" than ever before, and the city’s police commissioner could see that through with some serious changes starting at next year’s race.

Notwithstanding last week’s terrorist attack that killed three
and wounded hundreds, Boston, Massachusetts is expected to continue
its tradition of hosting the annual 26-mile run next spring.
Speaking to the city’s Herald newspaper though, Boston Police
Commissioner Ed Davis says he’s looking to add at least one new
element in 2014: unmanned aerial vehicles.

Weighing in with regards to how his city will ensure another
attack won’t ruin next year’s marathon, Davis says he’s looking
towards obtaining a drone aircraft to conduct surveillance from the
Boston sky.

“Drones are a great idea. I don’t know that would be the
first place I’d invest money, but certainly to cover an event like
this, and have an eye in the sky that would be much cheaper to run
than a helicopter is a really good idea,” he tells the
Herald.

Elsewhere in the interview, Commissioner Davis says the city
must do everything possible to prevent terrorists from attacking
their city again. “We need to harden our target here,” Davis
says. “We need to make sure terrorists understand that if
they’re thinking about coming here, we have certain things in place
that would make that not a good idea. Because they could hit any
place. They’re going to go for the softest, easiest thing to
hit.”

“We need to gather all the information we can as to what
happened and make a determination as to the overall commitment the
city of Boston has to the threat of terrorism,” he says.
“That’s very, very important to me. It’s very important to the
mayor. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions about
that.”

Indeed questions are quickly amounting, and they’ve been asked
of officials in Massachusetts and else since well before last
week’s attack. The Federal Aviation Administration expects tens of
thousands of drones in US airspace by the end of the decade, and
already the FAA is approving Certificates of Waiver or
Authorization (COA) for a number of law enforcement agencies on
target to fully take America into the age of drones.

The FAA says that 327 COAs were active as of February of this
year, but a recent report published by the Los Angeles Times
suggests that surveillance drones could fully permeate airspace
earlier than once thought. According to the Times, the FAA issued
1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, a statistic
that Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Jennifer Lynch
says is “far more than were previously known.”

The EFF has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the
FAA in recent years to try and get the facts of the expansive use
of drones, but the federal agency has been less than fully
compliant in terms of answering their questions. Discrepancies
exist in the statistics that have been released, admits the EFF,
but at the same time what has been brought to light through these
FOIA requests reveals a great deal about domestic drone use that
might otherwise not be made public.

Thanks to efforts by the EFF and others, Americans now know the
names of dozens of law enforcement and educational entities that
have applied for a permit to put experimental drones up in the sky,
and that list includes institutions such as Cornell University, the
Houston, Texas Police Department and a number of federal agencies,
especially branches of the US Department of Homeland Security.

And while no record of an applicant looking for a drone permit
in Massachusetts has been published, it’s quite possible that the
unmanned planes will be cleared to fly over cities like Boston and
Lowell in little time. In fact, some Massachusetts legislators are
already looking at stopping the spread of drones in their state
before law enforcement agencies capitalize on the aircraft’s
surveillance capabilities: in January, Republican State Senator
Robert L. Hedlund introduced S.B. 1664, “An Act to regulate the use
of unmanned aerial vehicles.”

If Sen. Hedlund’s bill is passed, Massachusetts law enforcement
will be limited with how they operate drones within the state. The
senator’s act has been approved by a number of colleagues in the
state capitol, and if enacted it will forbid police agencies from
using UAVs for dragnet surveillance. Hedlund’s law limits drone to
single out only persons of interest named in official court
warrants, and biometric matching technology would not be allowed to
be implemented on any other person picked up by a drone’s
cameras.

Earlier this month, the Florida State Senate voted unanimously
to ban law enforcement agencies there to conduct overhead spy
missions using unmanned aerial vehicles except in situations where
the DHS believes that drones could deter a high-risk terrorist
attack.